The Silent Forest: Siamese rosewood

The Siamese rosewood tree is now so valuable that two small pieces carried in a rucksack are worth $500. This kind of money means that armed criminal gangs up to a hundred strong have stripped the forests of Thailand bare of the rosewood.

It has been dug out of the central reservations of roads, from temple courtyards and school playgrounds.

Nearly all of it is destined for the Chinese rosewood ‘hongmu’ furniture market. There has been a middle-class craze for this traditional furniture since 2008 when centuries-old temples were restored in Beijing, using rosewood, for the Olympic Games.

This is the story of what happens when the market concentrates on a single species and wipes it out in nine years; and of what happens to the local people who simply happen to live in the places that this tree used to grow.